


All They Have Left

by volti



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Cutting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-01
Updated: 2014-04-01
Packaged: 2018-01-17 20:41:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1401775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/volti/pseuds/volti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s the only way either of them can find their words, but he supposes it could be worse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All They Have Left

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Megilien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Megilien/gifts).



> For a friend! The prompt was: French[/French-Japanese?]!Levi and just this idea of their bonding over their cultural backgrounds [Mikasa showing him her clan markings etc]
> 
> Please be warned that this **fic does feature cutting/self-mutilation.** It's a reference to Mikasa's clan markings, but that doesn't mean it doesn't warrant a warning. Please keep this in mind as you read.

“Ackerman, an assignment for--what the _fuck_ are you doing?”

Levi stands in the hall outside Mikasa’s room, eyes furiously wide and fingers gripping the doorway to her room so tightly that they’re almost white. The papers in his hand fall to the floor in an unorganized heap at his feet, and he does nothing to clear his path, unable to move. “Drop that blade,” he exhales. “Now.”

Mikasa nearly does so out of shock from her place at her small desk, wincing as every muscle in her body tenses almost immediately. The dull side of the blade presses into the pad of her finger; the sharp edge is spattered with blood and glinting in the candlelight as it hovers steadily, dangerously, over her upturned wrist. “It’s not what it looks like--"

" _Now!_ " Levi barks, and it seems as though he could splinter the doorway with only the tone of his voice. "First you get up and walk with an injured leg and broken ribs, and now this. Are you _trying_ to die?"

"If you would just let me explain--"

"So help me," Levi begins, voice threateningly low, kicking the papers aside as he takes up an angry stride. "So help me, I will take it from you myself if you don't put it down. You have five seconds."

"I'm not a dog," Mikasa bites out against heat and pain. "Or a child. Don't talk to me like one." But Levi has already grabbed her wrist, fresh blood trickling under his fingertips, drying against her skin as it cuts ribbons down her forearm and soaks into the cuff of her rolled-up sleeve. She nearly chokes on her breath from the sudden sting of it. "Let _go_ of me!"

He does let go, as though her skin has suddenly caught fire; in the flurry of it all, Mikasa notices that he doesn't make a face at the blood on his hand. Instead, he eyes her wrist carefully, scanning the intricate trails of red that blossom over skin and tendon alike, and his form slackens just slightly. "A pattern?"

"You never gave me a chance to explain," Mikasa hisses, clutching her still-bleeding wrist to her chest as though it is an injured child. "It's something I have to do."

"Why?"

"I don't think that's any of your business," she snaps. "Not for someone who just barges into rooms and grabs people without giving them the chance to speak."

"Watch your tongue, Ackerman," Levi counters, fixing her with a hard stare. "Around someone of a higher rank, and especially around someone looking out for your well-being."

"I'm fine. I'm not hurting myself. Leave me alone." When she looks up at him, her eyes are glistening with tears he never knew her capable of. "Give me this time to myself. Please."

With a furrowed brow and lips pressed tightly together, he waits a moment before giving her a solemn nod and backing out of the room, telling her not to do anything stupid, humans are too valuable to do anything like that to themselves.

In the morning, when the heat of conflict has passed, a fresh white bandage graces her right wrist as she returns the completed paperwork--neat and organized, if a bit wrinkled--to his office and grumbles a half-apology for making him worry. "It's the symbol of my mother's clan," she mumbles in explanation, pressing her fingers to her bandaged wrist. "It's all I have left to remember where I come from. If it fades, so do I. So I have to keep marking it."

Levi only nods in understanding and gives her an apology of his own, with all of the wisdom of someone who is not fifteen and a different brand of impulsive and all of the stubbornness of someone unsure of how to put worry into exact words. Slowly, he puts down his pen and reaches out for her hand, fixing calm eyes on steely ones as he waits with an unmoving palm. And just as slowly, she places her upturned hand upon his, fingers tensed like claws and ready to attack at the first sign of aggression. Without a word, he curls his hand around her own, and without a word, she waits and settles in the chair across from him, fingers coiling inward in rest.

"This is all you have left," Levi murmurs, and Mikasa nods, eyes fixed on their hands, seemingly unable to look anywhere else.

"Those words are all you have left, too," she answers without looking at him, her words more of an observation than a question. "Aren't they."

Levi's brows furrow. "What words?"

"Just now. You were saying some foreign words under your breath when I came in. You were saying them until you noticed I was here." As she pulls her hand away and rests it in her lap, she eyes him with all the calm wisdom he always supposed she had; it's pure, unadulterated, so very like him that it almost pains him physically. "Sometimes you say them when you're doing your paperwork. They're all you have, but you don't know where they came from exactly."

Levi can't help but stare at her as she speaks, wonder how she could pay such attention to a detail others would consider inconsequential.

"You should find those words again," Mikasa says with her eyes cast downward, still cradling her wrist as she gets to her feet and dignifies him with a single nod. She turns on her heel and walks to the door, and the glance she tosses back at him insists that she will not let him fade either.

He begins to call her to his office three times a week. There is nothing particularly out of the ordinary about it--he's come to find her standing under his wing with her hands on her hips in the time since their less-than-synchronized encounter with the Female Titan, and she burns through the paperwork he's never wanted to do. She works quietly, signing here, filing there, questioning the notes he's made in the margins of certain papers. Sometimes he manages to glimpse the bit of bandage that pokes past her sleeve before she tugs it back down, and sometimes he hears her murmur unintelligible words of her own to herself as she works.

It isn’t until a few weeks later that he realizes she is saying, “ _grands sarcophages_ ,” over and over again, in a tone that bespeaks the hope that he will not hear her. Her pronunciation is mediocre at best--her r’s sound like wheezes at the back of her throat and she says her o's with her lips too pursed--but it’s the only indication he has that she’s ever paid attention to anything he’s ever said. He looks her in the eye when she says it again, stops the second word before it tumbles from her tongue and then coaxes it from her.

"It's called French," he tells her. "The language." And when Mikasa asks where he learned it, he mumbles something about his mother and pushes the sole image of her washing dishes and conversing in tongues and reciting the words of a writer they never knew to the edge of his consciousness.

Mikasa goes back to filing and reciting the same two words again and again until they grate on his mind; he tells her to stop and take a seat, and he takes her to the beginning, _L'un t'éclaire avec son ardeur_. He watches her lips carefully, clicking his tongue and shaking his head when she stumbles over herself and bringing her back to the start each time. He teaches her a new line every time they meet, and she learns the poem and its translation in a month's time, fighting the smile that curls at her lips when she can finally fit _grands sarcophages_ into its rightful place. In return, she trades him a few short words in her own tongue--haikus, she calls them--and snorts at his slips of tongue. She guides him through each syllable until he can speak of autumn frost and a place called the Milky Way, and she leans back in her chair with a satisfied smile and tears pricking at her eyes, clutching her wrist to her chest as always. It’s the only way either of them can find their words, but he supposes it could be worse.

Weeks later, she comes to him with two thick, dust-caked books in her hands, murmuring the words he taught her and wincing as she cracks one open and flips through the dog-eared, abysmally thin pages. " _L'Alchimie de la Douleur_ ," she says as though she is a native speaker. "The Alchemy of Sorrow. Charles Baudelaire." When Levi only stares at her dumbfoundedly in response, she pushes the book toward him and adds, "This is the poem. These are the words. I found them." In a fluid motion, she opens the other book, points out strange characters he's never seen before, and says, "And these are mine."

Levi’s eyes and fingertips pass over the printed words in disbelief, lips forming the words on the page. The image of his mother creeps at the corners of his mind, and think perhaps he can hear her speaking to him. “How did you--”

“Armin helped me,” she replies simply, testing his language on her tongue. “On our last expedition outside Wall Rose. Our group found books scattered everywhere and we took them back. We thought we might be able to find some information in them.”

Not bad, he thinks. The grammar could be better, the pronunciation is slow and cautious, but it’s not bad. He thanks her solemnly in the language of her people, and her lips part in surprise before she settles.

“I have something I want to show you,” she tells him softly. Her hands shake as she grips the end of her bandage, slowly unwrapping it and letting it ripple, pristine as snow, into a heap on his desk, and she shows him the intricate pattern on her wrist--or rather, what is left of it. They are nothing more than pink-and-white bumps over veins and tendons and the fairest skin he’s ever seen, trembling as she does, nothing like the bloody mess he saw almost a year ago. She lays her upturned wrist upon his hand, breath catching in her throat when their hands finally touch, and her eyes fall closed when his fingertips delicately trace over each line of the scar, feather-light touches that could break her, or not.

“It’s fading,” he says. He could say anything, ask her what this part of the symbol means, note that each line is so straight, so precisely carved, but all he can say is, “It’s fading,” like a part of him and her is dying. He traces each line over and over, unconsciously memorizing it all, as though his fingers will leave something indelible behind.

“Again,” she adds with a crack in her voice, and she fishes in her pocket and presses a small, flat blade into his palm, closing his fingers around it. “Please.”

For a moment, they do nothing but stare at each other, he with incredulity, she with a flicker of a plea. For a moment, they do nothing but sit there, he with the blade digging into his palm, she with her wrist still exposed to him. “Please,” she says again, curling her fingers around his and squeezing hard enough for them to turn white.

Silently, he nods his consent, sterilizing the blade with the alcohol Hanji left in his room as she takes a seat upon his desk and holds her wrist out to him. Haikus dance on her tongue, light-footed as she is graceful and diligent, and with cold, uncertain fingertips, he traces the symbol once, twice, again, as though he might slip up and forever ruin all she has left. She exhales at the touches, urging him to go ahead with it, it doesn’t hurt her, all he has to do is follow the pattern that’s already there.

She doesn’t flinch at all when he makes the first cut, only mouths the words to poetry older than anyone in the barracks. “Say it out loud,” he tells her, swallowing as he splits new-old lines into her skin, blood blossoming in its wake. The slow drip of it sickens him, and internally he laughs at the irony of it all, how he sits here, able to slice the napes of those who were once human, able to rip out fingernails and leave silent men for dead, and yet trembling--he, trembling!--at the thought of carving a legacy into the canvas of a young woman’s skin. How nearly a year ago this was something like a child to her, and yet here she is, sharing it with him and speaking his own words back to him with a lilt and a hum and no traces of pain. She reads poem after poem, accents and hollow letters weighing heavy on her tongue, and she finishes a particularly long one just as he makes the final marks. Wordlessly, he presses an alcohol-soaked square of gauze to her wrist, wraps the bandage where it belongs, and wordlessly, he stands to look her in the eye, takes her face in his hands, and leans in to press his mouth to hers.

They kiss as they speak, in tongues, exchanging breaths as they exchange backgrounds, and when they pull apart and touch their foreheads together, he rests his lips on her wrist and sighs. The smell of alcohol burns his nose, and he has no word for it. And he has no word for how she looks at him in that moment. There is no alchemy, no sorrow, no autumn frost and no night spectacle. There is only rough gauze and slow breathing, abandoned poetry and the urge to kiss again and again, and he closes each book and holds her hands and keeps her from fading as he starts to think he is meant to.


End file.
